I’m Dr. Felicia Krauss and I have been working in Amsterdam for two years. I focus on multimessenger and multiwavelength aspects of black hole systems; Galactic black holes (~10 times the mass of our Sun) and supermassive black holes (One million to 1 billion times the mass of the Sun; this equals the total mass […]
Peculiar black hole systems and multimessenger observations Read More »
Throughout this past year, I have been working in Sera’s group, alongside Matthew Liska (PhD of Michiel van der Klis), on analyzing the largest black-hole (BH) accretion simulations ever performed. In collaboration with Alexander Tchekhovskoy (Northwestern University) and Adam Ingram, we studied tilted accretion of magnetized matter onto a rapidly spinning BH, and the resulting
Publication and Press Coverage: Rapidly Spinning Black Holes Launch Precessing Jets Read More »
Yeah, so it’s been awhile. But the semester is starting, there are new people in the group, and with the help of Vanna Pugliese, we’re going to start updating and revamping the site to make it more active. To kick it off, here’s a funny handheld panorama taken in Porquerolles, an island off the coast
Starting to revive the site Read More »
Today was Earth Day but also the day of many Marches for Science across the planet. We did our part here in Amsterdam (see also marchforscience.nl): a group of us from the astronomy department here at University of Amsterdam set up a booth and hung out all day answering questions, showing the solar telescopes we
The Event Horizon Telescope (see here for a nice article about the project) just triggered it’s first 2017 observation, the first ever with phased ALMA at its core, as well as several other facilities across the globe of the Earth!! Tonight we’ll be observing the tiniest scales ever seen before in “Track D”, which means
Ever watched a black hole launch matter into space? Me neither, but this simulation comes pretty close! The video below is a visualization of a high resolution 2D simulation of the accretion disk of a black hole, made by me using the state-of-the-art GRMHD* code called HAMR** on a single GPU. The simulations are partly
2D simulation of an accretion disk with jet Read More »
Hi, My name is Casper. Besides the usual astrophysics conundrums I’m also interested in how the brain works. Neuroscience is a bit like astrophysics in that we are pretty good in imaging stuff but still limited in our understanding. To illustrate this, here is a picture of my own brain made with a technique called
New brain on the team Read More »
Black holes Sometimes people ask if black holes work like a vacuum cleaner, which can empty the whole universe, starting with the surrounding stars. We know that it is not true: the gravitation works roughly in the same way for solar-mass black hole and the Sun (talking about the space above solar radius from the
Why Tidal Disruptions are interesting Read More »
Hi! My name is Adam Ciesielski and I started my PhD at University of Amsterdam a few months ago, in October. This was also a real personal change in my life – it was the first time I really moved to the different city, and country even. I am not an English native speaker, so
The first few months Read More »
My colleague Adam Ciesielski and I recently returned from a 5-week work visit in (mostly) sunny Austin, Texas. Sera had been awarded the Beatrice Tinsley Centennial Visiting Professorship, permitting her to visit the University of Texas (UT) for a semester, and Adam, Chiara and I were excited to learn that we would be joining her at
